Combating Hatred Among Us

The headlines in a local newspaper screamed the news that a racially and ethnically diverse school district of 7,000 students was “in crisis” after racially charged text messages between the superintendent and the district’s athletic director had surfaced.

The revelation in fall 2013 shook the Pennsylvania school district and its community to the core, and aftershocks continue to this day. It involved a highly regarded educator who had led the district’s varsity football team to fame prior to becoming high school principal and then superintendent.

This is a limited sampling of the text messages (note the “n” word was spelled out in the original texts) traded between the two:

Athletic Director (AD) to Superintendent (Supt): “All should just have whatever first names they want ... then last name is N----R! Leroy N----r, Preacher N----r, Night train n----r, Clar-ence n----r, Latoya n----r, Thelma n----r and so on.”

Supt to AD: “Great idea! Joe n----r bill n----r snake n----r got a nice ring to it.”

AD to Supt: “LMAO!” (Laugh my ass off)

Supt to AD: “hahahah … could have whole homerooms of N----r! hahahahahahahaha! Will N----r report to office, pardon the interruption but will N----r report to nurses office. N----r to lunch now!”

Supt to AD (referring to pending teacher layoffs): “23 get clipped Tuesday …”

AD to Supt: “How many n----rs out of 23? Not enough!

Supt to AD: “Don’t know but think it’s only 4-5.”

AD to Supt: “Good hangings there!”

The ongoing exchange contained sexually explicit remarks regarding interracial sex acts as well as offensive racial, ethnic and sexual comments against blacks, Jews, Arabs and women and continued over several days. The texts were especially remarkable because of the school district’s diverse student body, which is approximately 49 percent white, 36 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian.

Continuing Fallout

The school district’s technology director (a Lebanese-American referred to in one of the texts as a “camel jockey”) uncovered the texts as he was erasing data from the athletic director’s district-issued cell phone. He reported the content of the text messages to a district administrator, who in turn shared them with a school board member.

When members of the school board met with the superintendent, he admitted to sending and receiving the texts and subsequently informed the board he was retiring. The athletic director followed suit.

When local news media acted on tips regarding the text messages and the administrators’ resignations, community members made it clear through multiple public marches and raucous school board meetings that they wanted the men fired outright. Ultimately, the board accepted the resignations, citing potential legal problems if the men were fired. This action enabled the two to keep their state pensions, which infuriated the community. The entire matter resulted in board members’ resignations and a new board being seated after the next election.

Fallout from the incident continues, and the district’s reputation has suffered. The text messages were used as the basis for an employment discrimination lawsuit by a former district employee. The superintendent was charged with several offenses, including theft for using district funds to pay for championship rings for the football team with the matter expected to go to trial this fall.

Varying Reactions

Reactions from educators to the text messages have been varied as was evident when I led roundtable sessions at a statewide conference of superintendents in April 2016 and at AASA’s 2017 National Conference on Education.

Most superintendents interviewed at these two forums expressed shock or disbelief at the hateful messages. Others, however, indicated the texts should be viewed as little more than casual locker-room banter. One superintendent contended that, had the administrators used their private phones rather than district-issued cell phones, the appropriateness of the messages would not have been questioned.

A participant who teaches prospective superintendents at a university located near the Pennsylvania district said a distinction should be made between a person’s personality (surface persona) and character (internally held core beliefs). Another superintendent commented that if personality and character are not in sync, the outer façade will eventually disappear and reveal the true internal self, which can lead to a person’s moral collapse that jeopardizes the integrity of the district’s professed values.

In this case, the district’s mission statement specified it was a “learning community rich in diversity and committed to excellence by providing rigorous educational opportunities … [for] lifelong learners in a global society.” The parent/student handbook included a civil rights statement that read, in part, that the district “is an equal opportunity education institution and will not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color [or] national origin.”

The racist texts revealed the superintendent’s internal core beliefs lacked integrity and did not ring true with the professed district values. Hundreds of angry protesters recognized this and were outraged at his deceit.

When superintendents at the roundtable sessions were asked whether they thought the core values exposed in the racist texts were uncommon, most said they were aware of other school leaders holding similar views.

Communal Values

If the views of the Pennsylvania superintendent and athletic director are not unusual, how do district leaders counter such attitudes? School system leaders must become transformational leaders to achieve greater cultural competence for the entire district.

To build dialogue on communal values, a superintendent from the Midwest shared his success using BaFá BaFá, a training simulation designed to increase cultural awareness by helping people understand the impact of culture on the behavior of individuals and organizations and recognize the value of diversity.

This district’s administrators and some faculty members completed substantive BaFá BaFá training. The program is expanding throughout the learning community to continue building positive communal values.

This account brought back memories of my own superintendency in the early 1990s. In my first month on the job, I faced angry parents, students and residents who were infuriated over an ACLU-led injunction against Christian prayer at commencement. The valedictorian was a young Jewish woman whose family initiated the injunction.

The fury intensified after I led the school board in instituting a policy against prayer at all school events. I was called the anti-Christ and was stalked. I had my trash stolen and received numerous threats. It did not subside until I opened an FBI file, held extensive meetings with community groups, began writing a column on tolerance for the local newspaper and eventually brought together a school board badly split when half were defeated in the next election by a coalition led by a national right-wing organization.

This crisis over school prayer led to teacher in-service programs on human rights and a revamping of the curriculum to emphasize communal values. During my 11 years as superintendent, there were many other human rights issues. For these we were better prepared. One was the threat of neo-Nazis who wanted a school boycott on Heinrich Himmler’s “death day” (see “Confronting a Neo-Nazi Hate Group” in  The School Administrator, November 2007). Teachers led the community in standing up to this threat by saying “No neo-Nazis here!

A meaningful way superintendents can promote development of common values and cultural competence is by leading faculty and staff to reflect on core values. This activity can be prompted in reaction to public displays of intolerance, such as the desecration of Jewish cemeteries or calls for Muslim citizens to leave the country or the public rallies of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Others can build community bonding through common readings of works that emphasize struggles that depict youth dealing with racial stress in many of America’s neighborhoods. Two such books are M.K. Asante’s Buck and Frank Meeink’s Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead.

Had the superintendent and athletic director of the suburban Philadelphia district reflected at all on the social justice aspects of such documents as the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, accepted them as part of their core values and used them to guide their actions, they might never have engaged in the offensive and hurtful text messaging.

Professional Duty

Professional organizations such as AASA and its state affiliates have a responsibility for promoting the ethical standards professed by these organizations. AASA’s professional code of ethics, adopted in March 2007, states in part, “An educational leader’s professional conduct must conform to an ethical code of behavior, and the code must set high standards for all educational leaders.”

National standards, high-stakes testing and data analyses tend to dominate the professional development agendas for state and national education organizations. Given the divisive political climate shown by the Charlottesville catastrophe and other hate-filled events around the country, our profession needs to pay more serious attention to developing deeper understanding of ethics related to cultural diversity.

Superintendents who hope to be considered as transformational must stand tall and reflect continuously on their core values. They need to lead their districts in examining communal values of equity and social justice. We cannot allow the racial, ethnic and religious hatred that divides this nation to stifle the very breath of our democracy.